Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.

I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don’t benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily… that’s frankly most of the benefits there.

The whole CSAM issue is why I’d never personally run an instance, nor any other kind of server that allows users to upload content. It’s an issue I have no desire to have to deal with moderating nor the legal risks of the content even existing on a server I control.

While I’d like to hope that law enforcement would be reasonable and understand “oh, you’re just some small time host, just delete that stuff and you’re good”, my opinion on law enforcement is in the gutter. I wouldn’t trust law enforcement not to throw the book at me if someone did upload illegal content (or if I didn’t handle it correctly). Safest to let someone else deal with that risk.

And even if you can win some case in court, just having to go to court can be ludicrously expensive and risk high impact negative press.

Reddit definitely has better features. It’s not even a competition. The reason we’re here is because of the Reddit administration and because of future potential. Eg, the apps are so new right now that Reddit’s official app is better. But in a couple of months, that won’t be the case anymore.

Of course, that’s understandable. But there’s too many people here that are interested in the reddit drama such that it ends up taking over many subs, drowning out other content.

It’s like how r/worldnews was created, because despite r/news being general, there was so many Americans that US news dominated the sub. We need to do the same with reddit drama IMO.

Strongly agreed. I view this as the biggest issue with LLMs. They will hallucinate a confidently incorrect answer for those cases. It makes them misinformation machines.

You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there’s utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they’ll only use one.

Tiktok is the absolute worst at irrational censorship. It’s a shame because the site is immensely popular and that means it is full of very interesting content. Yet, this is far from the first unreasonable thing they’ve been removing. It’s well known how Tiktok users came up with alternative words to circumvent words that were likely to get their content removed (e.g., “unalived” instead of “killed”).

Plus the kinds of people that migrated to Voat were… Not good people. IIRC, it was particularly the banning of FatPeopleHate that got many to move to Voat. The kind of people who’d quit a website because they said to stop harassing people for being fat are not good people. By comparison, this time, we’re migrating because Reddit is being disrespectful towards frankly all their users, but also particularly mods and the visibility impaired.

Strongly agreed. I think a lot of commenters in this thread are getting derailed by their feelings towards Meta. This is truly a dumb, dumb law and it’s extremely embarrassing that it even passed.

It’s not just Meta. No company wants to comply with this poorly thought out law, written by people who apparently have no idea how the internet works.

I think most of the people in the comments cheering this on haven’t read the bill. It requires them to pay news sites to link to the news site. Which is utterly insane. Linking to news sites is a win win. It means Facebook or Google gets to show relevant content and the news site gets users. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news sites because sites like Google and Facebook will avoid linking to them.

I’m not sure I see how that would affect the developer. The charge back would be only to the reseller, wouldn’t it?

Honestly, it’s hard to do that. Chrome’s dominance means much of the internet has been designed for chrome. If you don’t support the same features, people will complain that your browser is broken or sucks.

Myself, I used Firefox for the longest time before I eventually just got too annoyed with the umpteenth site not working correctly and switched to Chrome.

My work hilariously doesn’t have very good debugging support (mostly just for unit tests), but excellent profiling support even for prod, so I use profiling a ton but debuggers are less useful, due to only being able to use them in fake environments.

They’ve had one layoff, but have they had second layoff? – Merry (or Pipin? Idk the difference)

I did some investigation into this in https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/199, but stopped short of actually fixing it or spinning up an instance to investigate further, as just didn’t really have the time and energy (and haven’t yet).

Fixing the ! links probably isn’t too hard, but I’m not one to try anything without being able to run it. And really there should be an alias for /c/. I haven’t used Symfony so can’t tell if it’s as easy as I hoped. I’ve had countless times where I thought something would be easy but it turned out hard and vice versa…

The phrasing I like is “crypto is a solution searching for a problem”.

Crypto enthusiasts start with the existence of crypto and try to fit it as a solution to some problems rather than trying to solve those problems without already having chosen the solution. The reasoning is often flimsy as a result. They’re not actually trying to solve a problem and thus won’t consider things like “how is this better than a centralized system?”.

I don’t think GDPR necessarily applies here, but I am not a lawyer. Quoting https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/:

Article 3.1 states that the GDPR applies to organizations that are based in the EU even if the data are being stored or used outside of the EU. Article 3.2 goes even further and applies the law to organizations that are not in the EU if two conditions are met: the organization offers goods or services to people in the EU, or the organization monitors their online behavior. (Article 3.3 refers to more unusual scenarios, such as in EU embassies.)

I’m not sure just what the definition of an organization is, so perhaps any server hosted within the EU is covered by the GDPR, but for servers outside of the EU that don’t have ads (which seems like all servers currently), I don’t think this would count. The example on the linked site about “goods and services” includes stuff like looking for ads tailored at European countries, so I suspect that simply serving traffic from Europe isn’t enough.

The website also mentions the GDPR applies to “professional or commercial activity”. There’s also apparently an exception for under 250 employees. I don’t even know how that works when something is entirely managed by volunteers like this currently is.

At any rate, I suspect we’re a long way off from having to worry about the GDPR.

Honestly, I kinda question how good of a time investment it is to try and allow deletion from the public facing parts of the internet, given the numerous places where your content will be cached or otherwise stored.

There is certainly some value in simply making it as hard as possible to find things you want to delete. Why let perfect be the enemy of good, after all. There’s plenty of types of content we certainly want to do our best at deleting even if we can’t be perfect. Eg, do you wanna be the one to tell a revenge porn victim, “sorry, we can’t make it harder to find the content that harms you because we can’t delete all of it anyway”?

But at the same time, development time is limited. Everything is a trade off. We do have to decide what is most important, because we can’t do it all immediately. The fact we can’t actually delete everything does have to be a factor in this prioritization, too.

All this said, I do think federated, reliable deletion is critical for illegal content. Such content needs to be removed quickly and easily from as many places as possible. Without this, instance owners are put at considerable legal risk. This risk poses a threat to the scalability of the Fediverse.

Agreed. I don’t see the point in trying to ban something before it exists and before we even know anything about how it would work. I get it, Meta has done some shit. But on the other hand, having such a big player in the Fediverse could be huge for its growth, especially since the Fediverse has a serious UX issue and UX is Meta’s strength.

I don’t really understand the privacy concerns. Just don’t use their instances? Have y’all seen how the Fediverse already works? Stuff like your votes are already public and that can’t be easily changed. And a nifty thing is that if Meta makes a product for the Fediverse that is federated, it’s just as easy for its users to migrate to another Fediverse platform if we find out Meta pulls some shit.

Ads pretty much are the best bet.

That said, they aren’t the only option. Donations are a big alternative. That’s why Wikipedia is ad free, for example. The other big one is subscriptions, but you basically have to offer a lot to convince anyone to subscribe. And a lot of “subscriptions” are actually just a convenient way to donate, which should be viewed differently from non-donations, since far fewer people are willing to donate, due to being completely optional.

There’s also sponsored content, but that’s just deceptive ads. I’d rather ads be 100% transparent and obvious about being an ad.

Finally there’s angel investors, but those aren’t typically paying out of the goodness of their heart. They usually want to grow a business that they’ll later commercialize. They’ll get a great period of time where everything just magically gets paid for, but odds are, they’re gonna do something terrible later to monetize.

An obligatory mention that ads don’t have to be scummy. That’s the norm, yeah, but it’s entirely possible to serve only ethical, clearly marked ads that don’t utilize deception or are scams. It doesn’t make as much money as accepting scummy ads, which is why we usually end up with ads being scummy, but it is an option.

You mean the model that is easier to understand and helps get users to stick around? Defaulting to some local only view would be terrible for retaining people who are seeing kbin or Lemmy for the first time. Depending on what instance they ended up on, they might mistakenly think that kbin/Lemmy doesn’t have much to offer or that it’s specialized.

I mean, how many actual users are viewing local only? I’m skeptical that many people would purposefully be doing that. So why would we make it the default?

(As an aside, for comparison, I believe kbin defaults to “all”, which is great for showing the breadth of posts, but shows too many niche things. The point of defaults is to try and make the default view more general as a starting point that applies to more people.)